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May be grasping at straws here, but have you run a full Scandisk? Thinking along the lines that your HDD may have physical corruption and may be unusable. If that is indeed the case, the same problems will continue to resurface. The upside is you get to buy a newer, faster, bigger HDD, the downside is that you have to start over from scratch (not a good idea to image a swamped OS).

Good luck.

O

Last edited by Ouroboros; December 5th, 2007 at 07:24 AM.
Reason: incomplete

Save your licensing info from 3B for the Registry Repair Pro, first and foremost, it is still usable when you reload.

It seems that biting the bullet and picking up a new HDD is the best course of action in your case, Cider. It sucks to have to start fresh, but it's how I've learned how things work and what to watch out for. I've done it many times in the past 10-12 years.

Not sure how things work there in S.A., but I picked up a 160GB HDD here in the states for $75 USD. More than enough space for the casual user.

There is always a time when it's easier to just hit the metaphorical "reset" button and start fresh instead of fighting problems until you're blue in the face while getting nowhere with it.

as you said you already had the system working since over a year now, till recently it stopped updating/installing/removing programs.

how far back did it stop doing all that?

maybe some program changed a couple of settings. p2p programs and torrent clients have been known to change settings, specially the ports used to connect to internet with.

options:-
1) you can use the option to "repair windows" from the bootup xp cd. that way your files will not be deleted. After running the scan disk as recommended by Ouroboros

2) just go for a clean installation. that way before windows are installed, the setup "checks" the disk and re-allocates bad sectors (if any)

3) get into safe mode as recommended by nihiland t34b4g5 and start removing everything till you just have the windows (disconnected from the internet, obviously)
restart and see if the problem arises again.

if it does then format and reinstall windows
if it doesnt then its probably one of the programs.

just another thing.....have you ever got one of those blue screens which says something like "some error has happened and windows were shutdown to protect blahblah blah" kinds

I am not sure about the HDD, but it certainly seems like you have some corruption of your Windows installation.

If Windows cannot recognise the page file, that can cause all sorts of problems, which could be pretty unpredictable.

What make of HDD is it? I would certainly go to the manufacturer's website and get their diagnostics tools. See if they find any physical problems with the drive. If they do then it is time to get a new one pronto. You will need to run the in depth scan.

As for the page file, try the two suggestions I gave you earlier. If that doesn't work then create a small partition of say 3Gb. Go into control panel and set the path for the pagefile to point to this partition, then reboot.

That should force the system to build a totally new pagefile that should be recognised.